Living abroad as a writer has consequences I didn’t anticipate. Aside from not understanding innuendos in Hebrew, which I usually don’t, I miss hearing my native language spoken–especially by regular people on the street. It probably has something to do with the pleasure I take in eavesdropping, which I realized I no longer do. I’ve stopped listening to conversations random people are having in Tel Aviv because when they speak below a certain volume, I begin to lose too many words and the communication becomes incomprehensible. It’s actually an interesting phenomenon. Get a bilingual friend who speaks your native language and a second language that you understand but learned later in life to help you experiment with it sometime. When they whisper in your native language, you can usually fill in the blanks, but in a second language, even if you speak it and understand it pretty well, it has to be louder to understand. At least that’s my completely unscientific two cents on the subject.

But I only began to feel this loss after coming home to the United States for the longest period of time in recent years, almost two months now. Being home has made me realize that I miss reading all of the ingredients in the food I buy (and either knowing what they are or knowing that they sound too bad to eat). It turns out that being able to tell the difference between low-fat cottage cheese and sour cream is an acquired skill. I also miss being able to associate an accent or a specific vocabulary with a place, an age or even a racial group. For instance, it’s useful to know that if a stranger on the street says ‘yo, sista’, I probably shouldn’t reply, ‘hello, how may I assist you?’, which, I also realized recently, might be exactly how I sound sometimes in Israel. Wrong register, according to the linguistic rules.

The other thing that suffers a miserable fate when you live abroad is slang (understanding it and using it properly). When I arrived in California this August for my annual trip to the Burning Man festival, I kept hearing ‘agro’. I could sort of piece together what it meant based on the context of the sentence, but it surprised me that it was just one of many words I had never heard. The first time someone said, ‘that music is way too agro for me,’ I immediately thought to myself: what does that music have to do with agriculture? You get the point.

The other new ones for me were ‘brainiac’ and ‘cathouse.’ It turns out that braniac is used all the time. I’ve just never heard it used to describe a highly intelligent person in a positive way. Even this spell checker doesn’t recognize it and puts a disturbing red line beneath it (I hate those), but you’ll find it in the dictionary. Cathouse could be more related to my gender than my clumsy slang. I’m currently taking polls to find out if men and women know that cathouse means ‘brothel’ and not a cool little hut you can buy for your pet cat to hang out in that will cost you a small fortune and take up an entire corner of the living room.

Three weeks ago I started to write down snippets of conversations, new words, slang and idiomatic expressions. I feel like a starving mutt that has suddenly been offered an overabundance of food and water, which of course prompts ‘squirreling away for later’ behavior. I want to conserve every precious moment of the English I hear, with all of its different accents and slang, its double-entendres and senseless words. Somehow, putting it on paper gives it more permanence. And it will have to last until I make it home again. The Taiwanese guy at Quickly in San Fran saying, in his thick Taiwanese accent, ‘yoo not want to be the one holding stick when the lollel coastel go back down, yoo know?’ following a conversation about the risks of buying real estate in China. I’ll have to store in my memory a delicious moment when a thin, middle-aged white woman with long, white braids suddenly turned to her friend in an incense store and said in a low voice, ‘Bob, why you gotta be a hater?’ I have no idea what Bob did to deserve that, but what surprised me was that it came out of her mouth at all. Less surprising was the young hippie who, after a rather long jazz concert at the Fillmore, started screaming to the exiting crowd ‘Didn’t Skofield crush it? He crushed it dude!’ I especially loved hearing a kindergarten teacher describe an unruly child as ‘an emotional junkie.’

It’s mother tongue mania for me, and eavesdropping has regained its place of prominence on my list of favorite things to do. I’m scooping words out of every nook and cranny, peeling them off the sidewalks, filching them from the mouths of strangers. After all, I’ll have to hoard enough treasure to last until the refilling of the chest. And who knows when that will be.